There are many notable examples of bad customer relations involving big companies, but social media also affects midmarket enterprises—and the impact need not always be negative. Customer-relationship horror stories make for good headlines, but for every disaster there’s countless instances of companies paying attention to what their customers say via Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets—and putting the feedback to good use.

Companies must become more adept at using social technologies themselves and ensuring their own employees capture readily available content in the social networking world. Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership – How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, believes business leaders “like the idea of being able to hear instantly what their customers are saying about them.” She also says, “They’re curious about the ability to obtain new ideas from customers or to lower their support costs by having customers solve each others’ problems.”

Rather than seeing social media as a threat, companies can use user-generated content to proactively listen to conversations, spot opportunities and interact with their customers and clients. Even the most forward-looking company will, however, face challenges. Chief among the difficulties of integrating social media into CRM: how to sift through the deluge of tweets, Facebook posts, blogs, etc. to gain visibility into relevant conversations as they occur.

To this end, SAP has developed powerful CRM tools. For instance, SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis extracts, categorizes and summarizes data from social-media sources. Most importantly, the solution executes this functionality seamlessly. All conversations about your company’s product, services and overall organization are automatically delivered via the CRM dashboard. This functionality is fully integrated with the existing SAP solution, giving companies the ability to immediately join the conversation.